Protests, Media Coverage, and a Hierarchy of Social Struggle

Media and Communication

This study assesses the relationship between two well-established sets of frames to better understand the news coverage of massive political protests. By relying on Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic frames and McLeod and Hertog’s protest frames, this study aims to identify whether certain generic frames emphasized in news stories increase the tendency to delegitimize protest movements. To this end, we analyzed the news coverage of Chile’s Estallido Social, a series of massive political demonstrations that developed across the country from October to December 2019. Data for this study come from stories published by Radio Bío Bío, the most trusted news outlet in the country, according to Reuters Institute. By analyzing a sample of 417 stories, we found the coverage replicated patterns that usually delegitimize protest movements, as many of the stories focused on violent acts and depicted demonstrators as deviant from the status quo. We also found a direct relationship between generic f...

The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2012

Research shows that news coverage of protest groups that challenge the status quo treats them relatively critically. To develop a more precise understanding of such coverage, this study content analyzes an international set of newspapers (N = 220) to explore the relationships between a protest group's goals and tactics on resulting news coverage. The findings indicate that a group's tactics-more than its goals-play a substantial role in affecting coverage. Furthermore, the findings also show that the protest issue and location indirectly affect coverage through their relationship to a group's tactics. Implications for journalists and protesters alike are discussed.

Mass Communication and Society, 2018

This study compares U.S. digital news coverage of recent foreign and domestic protests. Differences in coverage's framing, sourcing, and device emphases were analyzed for two cases: protests that erupted after the death of Michael Brown and protests demanding justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico. Building on protest paradigm literature, content analysis results show that news articles that appeared on Facebook and Twitter emphasized legitimizing frames for foreign protests more than domestic protests. Foreign protests were framed with the spectacle frame more than domestic protests, which were more often portrayed as confrontational. Digitally native news organizations produced content that deviated from expected paradigmatic norms the most. In addition, this research examines the relationship between content and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Implications of these findings within the theoretical framework of the protest paradigm are discussed.

Sociology Compass, 2017

Why do newspapers cover social movement actors, and why is this coverage sometimes favorable? Early scholarship saw the news media mainly as a source of data on collective action, and sought to ascertain its biases, but scholarship has increasingly focused directly on why movements gain coverage, especially coverage that can advance their goals. To understand why and how newspapers cover movement actors, we start with the insight that movements rely on the news media for many reasons, but their coverage is largely in the control of news institutions. In this review, we focus on perspectives that specify 3-way interactions between the characteristics of newspapers, social movement actors, and the social and political contexts, but we begin with how news media institutions are organized. We conclude with suggestions for future research that take advantage of the digital revolution of the last generation. 1 | INTRODUCTION Social movement organizations and actors seek to gain mainstream mass news media coverage for many reasons: to alert the mass public to their causes (Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, & Rucht, 2002), to broadcast their understandings of issues and preferred means of redress (

2017

This dissertation examines television news coverage of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. Theories regarding the relationship between media and social movements are mostly based on outdated models of media and journalistic norms. In addition, the literature on framing is underdeveloped in that it has focused on the process of creating frames and the implications of collective action framing; less is known about the process of frame usage in nonprint media. My dissertation addresses these two problems. I develop the partisan media paradigm, an improved framework for understanding media coverage of social movements, by reformulating a dominant theory of media protest coverage, the protest paradigm, to account for the realities of today’s ideologically segmented media landscape. I contribute to the undertheorized area of framing by conceptualizing frames as gateways and identifying trajectories frames can take in mass media discourse. This research is important for three m...

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2020

Public reactions to protests are often divided, with some viewing the protest as a legitimate response to injustice and others perceiving the protest as illegitimate. We examine how online news sources oriented to different audiences frame protest, potentially encouraging these divergent reactions. We focus on online news coverage following the 2014 police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown. Preregistered analyses of headlines and images and their captions showed that sources oriented toward African Americans were more likely to include content conveying racial injustice and legitimacy of the subsequent protests than sources oriented toward a general audience. In contrast, general audience sources emphasized conflict between protesters and police, making fewer references to the protesters' cause. Whereas much work on media segregation addresses the propensity of audiences to consume different sources, our work suggests that news sources may also contribute to information fragmentation by differentially framing the same events.

2017

When covering protests, evidence suggests that the media tend to resort to the ‘protest paradigm’, a routinized template to produce protest stories, downsizing the scope, claims and mobilisation effects of the protest movements. This article examines the representations of protests by Cypriot mainstream media on the occasion of the recent economic remedies imposed by the EU/IMF. Framing analysis has indicated that media coverage adheres to the protest paradigm as the dominant frames of ‘drama’ and ‘inevitability’ signal an explicit effort to marginalise and delegitimise their claims, and therefore discredit their significance and potential to affect policy making. And yet, the findings suggest that the political orientation of the media does affect the representation of protests as the left-wing media provide empowering representations of the protests. Overall, however, media coverage is elite-sourced, episodic, lacking in-depth analysis and alternative policy suggestions. This stud...

When covering protests, evidence suggests that the media tend to resort to the ‘protest paradigm’, a routinized template to produce protest stories, downsizing the scope, claims and mobilisation effects of the protest movements. This article examines the representations of protests by Cypriot mainstream media on the occasion of the recent economic remedies imposed by the EU/IMF. Framing analysis has indicated that media coverage adheres to the protest paradigm as the dominant frames of ‘drama’ and ‘inevitability’ signal an explicit effort to marginalise and delegitimise their claims, and therefore discredit their significance and potential to affect policy making. And yet, the findings suggest that the political orientation of the media does affect the representation of protests as the left-wing media provide empowering representations of the protests. Overall, however, media coverage is elite-sourced, episodic, lacking in-depth analysis and alternative policy suggestions. This study contributes to the protest paradigm thesis, and argues that recent evidence claiming a repair of the paradigm are counterbalanced in the case of protests that radically question the status quo. Finally, considering the moderate protest movement that developed in Cyprus, the findings are discussed in conjunction with specific traits of the Cypriot political culture providing some preliminary interpretation on how the politics of futility and fear coupled by the ‘responsible politics’ discourse articulated systematically in the media, can offer a degree of insight into the development of modest protest dynamics.

The emergence of a national “Tea Party” movement in the United States stimulated much media commentary regarding the movement’s origins, goals, participants, and even temperament. Unlike political movements of the recent past, the Tea Party stands starkly to the right. This study examines nightly cable news coverage of this movement by using key frames associated with the “protest paradigm”—the tendency for media to marginalize movements by drawing attention away from core concerns raised by such movements. We ask whether the protest paradigm can be applied to a right-wing movement and whether such application varies by the ideological leaning of a given source. That is, do cable news channels use frames in ways consistent with their respective ideological hues? We draw on a representative sample of stories regarding the national movement from the most viewed nightly news programs on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, with the Associated Press as a reference point. Results show significant differences across sources in issue and marginalization frame use. Although utilization of marginalization frames is popular among ideological channels, traditional news sources are not immune from using these devices.

2017

This dissertation examined how reporters cover racial issues at a time when violence by police against African Americans has risen to a new level of salience among journalists. Drawing on Democratic Theory, I created a taxonomy of journalism about race across three paradigms: Traditional, Interactive Race Beat, and Journalism 3.0. I then performed a narrative analysis of coverage across the three paradigms. I employed the lens of Critical Race Theory to analyze coverage of three racial moments: the election of the U.S.'s first African American president, the rise of The Black Lives Matter Movement, and the civil unrest following the killing of an unarmed Black teen by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Next, I conducted interviews with journalists in each paradigm to assess influences on their reporting and interpreted their responses using theories of new institutionalism. Overall, I found Traditional journalism broke with previous norms to more closely resemble the coverage patterns found in born-digital Journalism 3.0 coverage, which showed racism as systemic, foregrounded the lived experiences of the oppressed, leveraged social media to monitor and interact with the audience, and eschewed the professional norm of objectivity. This work illustrates a fundamental shift in iii Traditional journalism at an important time of national reflection on racial issues and it presents a benchmark for studying emerging Interactive Race Beat and Journalism 3.0 coverage.